An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (39 page)

Shepherd, who, like Kerby, often railed against homosexuality, mistrusted Ward’s predilections. ‘I found his voice rather irritating,’ Shepherd recalled a year after he had been accosted by Ward on the Marylebone pavement. ‘It had a phoney, almost homosexual intonation. His whole manner was one to arouse suspicion.’ Shepherd subsequently met Ivanov for drinks at Ward’s flat on 31 October. The meeting degenerated into a slanging match about Soviet intentions. By Shepherd’s self-dramatising account, Ivanov trumpeted the opinions of ‘a big-fisted Stalinist’, and was furious when Shepherd said, ‘
We
didn’t enter into a squalid pact in 1939 to share the milk with Hitler.’ At the Wimpole Mews flat, said Shepherd, were both Rice-Davies and Keeler, whom he recognised from Murray’s. He had already heard tales linking Keeler with Profumo. Seeing her with Ivanov, in the flat of this mysterious Dr Ward, alarmed him.
¹⁵

So, too, did an incident that occurred as he was leaving. ‘We must go, too,’ said Ward, indicating Ivanov. ‘We’re going to have dinner with Iain Macleod.’ This dropping of the Leader of the House of Commons’ name was typical of Ward’s distortions: he had no dinner invitation from Macleod, whom he never met, but had inveigled a youngster to bring him along with Ivanov for drinks with Macleod’s teenage children. Shepherd reported the meeting to his MI5 handler: Ivanov knew both Ward and Keeler, he said, and Keeler was involved with Profumo. He also warned Macleod that his name was being invoked by dubious characters. Finally, during the time of the Vassall homosexuality panic, possibly at the instigation of his MI5 handler, he sent Macmillan a letter threatening further exposures of ministers, and denounced several parliamentary colleagues to the Chief Whip, Redmayne. At the end of this meeting in November 1962, Shepherd claimed he told Redmayne: ‘And there’s a problem with Jack Profumo: you’d better be very careful.’
¹⁶

Keeler had meanwhile met a former merchant seaman from Antigua, Johnny Edgecombe, who had served prison sentences for larceny, pimping and possession of drugs, and ran a shebeen in a Notting Hill flat leased from Rachman. She lived briefly with him in Brentford. After ‘Lucky’ Gordon then ambushed Keeler and knocked her to the pavement, she and Edgecombe confronted him outside the Flamingo jazz club in Wardour Street on Saturday 27 October. A fight erupted: Edgecombe knifed Gordon, who needed seventeen stitches in his face. Keeler went into hiding with Edgecombe, but left him in December because she found him domineering and sexually inconsiderate.

Although in October 1962, Rachman supposedly gave Rice-Davies £1,000 in cash, wrapped in brown paper, as an eighteenth birthday present, he was so morose that soon afterwards she left the Bryanston Mews premises where he kept her, and moved into Ward’s spare bedroom at Wimpole Mews. A few weeks later, on Saturday night of the last weekend of November 1962, Rachman went gambling at the 150 Club in Earls Court. He left early because he felt queasy and, driving north to Hampstead Garden Suburb, had to stop the car because he felt so bad. For some time he sat hunched over the steering wheel in a St John’s Wood street. At home, on Sunday morning, he suffered a heart attack, and was taken by ambulance to Edgware Hospital, where a second massive coronary thrombosis killed him.

On Friday 14 December, Keeler went to visit Rice-Davies at Ward’s flat. Around one o’clock Edgecombe arrived there in a minicab, raging that she was consorting with Gordon, and furiously ringing the bell. Rice-Davies called to him from a first-floor window that Keeler was at the hairdressers. Edgecombe was not fooled and produced a gun, which he fired at the lock of the front door, then at the window from which Rice-Davies was gazing down. Having failed to climb a drainpipe he dropped his gun and fled. When the police arrived, Keeler, who often fibbed under pressure, said the gun was hers. Edgecombe was soon detained, and remanded for trial on a charge of attempted murder.
¹⁷

In this period Keeler smoked cannabis often. Her hold on reality was slack; her days were a smudge of shapeless improvisation; her chatter was sometimes spry and amusing, occasionally indignant, but never discreet. On 23 December she accompanied Paul Mann to a Christmas party in Rossmore Court, a block of flats between Marylebone Station and the Regent’s Park. There, with huffs of anger, she recounted her recent experiences to several unreliable confidants. Mann, who had been born in 1936, was a nimble-witted man without impractical ideals: although described in the press as a racing driver, at this time he ran a shirt business in Manchester. Another guest at the party – he lived a minute’s walk from Rossmore Court – was John Lewis, the obnoxious former MP who had an inveterate hatred of Ward. To both of them Keeler talked of Ward, Profumo and Edgecombe’s gunshots. Neither was a safe repository of secrets.

Mann approached journalists about selling the story; Lewis sneaked to a Labour MP called George Wigg on 2 January 1963. Keeler made further rash confidences to Michael Eddowes, a deceptively fatherly-looking man with patrician airs whom Rebecca West likened to a Peter Sellers imitation of an English gentleman. Eddowes ran a South Kensington restaurant called Bistro Vino. He was a plausible, self-aggrandising obsessive who cajoled the Texans into exhuming the body of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1981 to test his hare-brained theory that the man who shot President Kennedy was a Soviet imposter. Lewis saw the ‘Darling’ note which Profumo had written, and so probably did Eddowes.

The letter was also seen (perhaps through Lewis) by a puffy-faced youngster called Lawrence Bell, who lived in the dingy London suburb of Wanstead and was a newspaper stringer. ‘This started a train of malice and filth which went through a Mr Lawrence Bell to Colonel Wigg, and other Socialist members,’ Ward later alleged to his MP, Sir Wavell Wakefield. It was almost amusing to see Ward, whom many people found unsavoury, complaining about Bell, who had (he believed) been involved with Lord Longford’s prisoner aid charity and (less probably) was a friend of Wigg. ‘Mr Bell has been arrested recently for persistent importuning,’ he told Wakefield. ‘It was he who set off the Fletcher-Cooke scandal with the papers.’ Charles Fletcher-Cooke was a whimsical barrister-MP who had served as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Home Office under Henry Brooke. He had been introduced by a tipsy Hove bachelor, Lord Maugham, to a nineteen-year-old ex-borstal lad (and policeman’s son), Anthony Turner, who went to live in Fletcher-Cooke’s house as a novel way of getting straightened out. The youth was stopped by the police for exceeding the speed limit in Commercial Road, Stepney, while driving Fletcher-Cooke’s Austin Princess car. After Turner’s appearance on 4 March at Bow Street magistrates’ court (on charges of speeding and driving while disqualified and uninsured) Fletcher-Cooke resigned his Home Office post. When Bell later appeared in court on nine charges of indecency with guardsmen, his counsel described him as having been responsible for Fletcher-Cooke’s resignation.
¹⁸

Colonel George Wigg, for whom Lewis and Bell served as informers, was a suspicious, slippery, vindictive man with the mentality of a police grass. Wigg had joined the Tank Corps in 1919 when he was eighteen, rose from the ranks to be a non-commissioned officer, and had made a stealthy study of military organisation with the help of socialist writings. He resented the fact that the army of a twentieth-century industrial power was organised like a peasant levy led by the gentry and nobility: its outlook, hierarchy and discipline all reflected a social order based on the ancestral rights of the landed interest. Garrison life taught him, he said, to punch hard and below the belt. As a result of wartime service in the Education Corps he achieved the rank of colonel, which he persisted in using in peacetime. He was elected as a Labour MP in 1945.

When Wigg’s elephantine ears caught a Tory ex-minister muttering a criticism of the Speaker during a Commons debate, ‘the unspeakable Wigg broke every rule of behaviour by reporting this’. As the best-informed Labour MP on the Select Committee for Reform of the Army and Air Force Acts in the early 1950s, Wigg saw himself as the soldiers’ protector from political incompetence or hanky-panky. Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister, and Antony Head, the then Secretary of State of War, ‘adopted a foolish attitude towards Wigg, who was one of the few members of his party who really had the interests of the services at heart’, recalled their parliamentary colleague Ian Harvey. ‘They mocked him for being an Education Corps colonel, whereas he had previously had a long career in the Tanks Corps.’ Wigg was a man who nursed his grievances. Profumo’s handling of complaints about living conditions in the British Army on the Rhine and the ill-equipment of troops in Kuwait infuriated him. Already hell-bent on damaging Profumo before Lewis approached him, Wigg immediately opened a dossier in which he filed every tit-bit that he heard.
¹⁹

On 15 January 1963, a fortnight after Lewis denounced Profumo to Wigg, Lord Radcliffe’s Vassall tribunal began its public hearings. The following day, at Marlborough Street Court, the preliminary hearing of Edgecombe’s case was held. Denning later reported that Ivanov last met Ward on 18 January, but like much that Denning printed, this may be untrue: the men perhaps never met after Christmas 1962. Ivanov returned to Moscow perman-ently on 29 January – perhaps to protect his embassy from being incriminated in the attempted shooting of a ‘model’ by a black hoodlum. Given all that followed, it is worth reiterating the opinion of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Carrington, that the security stunt raised over the tenuous Ivanov-Profumo connection was ‘humbug from first to last’.
²⁰

Paul Mann had by then convinced Keeler that she could profit by selling her story to the press. On 22 January 1963, accompanied by Rice-Davies, she visited the Mirror Group’s headquarters with Profumo’s ‘Darling’ letter in her handbag. Cudlipp assessed her story together with Reg Payne, editor of the
Sunday Pictorial
, which some months later was renamed the
Sunday Mirror
following the restructuring that created the International Publishing Corporation. Having photographed the note, the
Sunday Pictorial
offered her £1,000 for the right to publish it. Keeler then tried to sell her story for a higher price to Peter Earle, crime reporter of the
News of the World
, but botched the negotiation. She therefore accepted the
Sunday Pictorial
offer, was paid £200 up front (with the second payment of £800 payable if the story was published), and was allotted two reporters to extract her story.

Keeler started chattering spicily about rich men in high places and Caribbean low-lifers. The questioning prompts from the two journalists soon showed her what they wanted: Profumo, Ivanov and sex. At one point she said that Ward had told her to ask Profumo when West Germany would get American secrets about atomic weapons. Ward did ask her this, as a joke; she knew it was a joke, and repeated it as a joke to the
Sunday Pictorial
men. No one who met her for half a minute would have mistaken her for a Mata Hari who could extract state secrets with pillow talk. No one could think that Profumo, in rapture or post-coital gratitude, would have supplied her with classified information, even if he knew it. Yet this was what journalists wanted excuses for pretending. In the
Pictorial
’s pompous re-writing of the joke, the following phrases were attributed to Keeler: ‘I did find it worrying when someone asked me to try to get from Profumo the answer to a certain question. That question was: “When, if ever, are the Americans going to give nuclear weapons to Germany?” I am not prepared to say in public who asked me to find out the answer to that question. I am prepared to give it to the security officials. In fact, I believe now that I have a duty to do so.’
²¹

Earle, after severing
News of the World
negotiations with Keeler, approached Ward for a story. Ward was aghast, telephoned Astor, and on 28 January the men consulted William Rees-Davies, a barrister who was a Tory MP. Billy Rees-Davies had lost an arm in the war, and usually wore a cloak, which made him look raffish. He was a gossip, a drinker and director of a public relations firm and of John Bloom’s washing machine company. Ward explained that the
Sunday Pictorial
had bought Keeler’s memoirs, which might compromise Astor, Profumo and himself. He feared that she might give a publicity boost to the memoirs when she testified in Edgecombe’s imminent trial.

On hearing of these developments from Astor, Profumo requested a visit from MI5. Denning’s report, relying on a brief supplied by MI5 which seems misleading, stated that Profumo was visited by the Director General of the Security Service, Sir Roger Hollis. Profumo’s recollection, which is more credible, is that he was visited by a senior MI5 man: he asked his visitor if MI5 could suppress the
Sunday Pictorial
story on the basis that it compromised the ‘honey-trap’ operation against Ivanov, about which he knew. The MI5 officer doubted if anything of the sort could be done. Rees-Davies and Profumo’s solicitor, Derek Clogg, began to negotiate with Keeler’s solicitor, who demanded compensation of £5,000 for the annulment of her
Sunday Pictorial
contract.

Independently of this, Ward telephoned an assistant editor on
Sunday Pictorial
warning that there were factual errors in Keeler’s story, and that he, Astor, Profumo and perhaps others would sue if the article was published. The
Sunday Pictorial
capitulated and withdrew the story. Ward had succeeded where the lawyers had failed. Keeler kept her £200, but was aggrieved that he had prevented her from collecting the extra £800.